On Wed, 12 Mar 2025 21:09:27 +0000 (UTC), Graham Donald wrote:

>This teardown video of a fishing float is an interesting example of how economies of scale can affect the cost of things. In this case you have a fishing float that uses lights to alert the fisherman that somethings on the hook. To do that they use a microcontroller moderated three-axis accellerometer! It's another example of a thing that could turn up in a cargo.
>https://youtu.be/nRPdzQXeTk4?si=C0E_mz7RBdz2nhYO

Indirectly related, tech might not only turn up in the strangest places, it
might turn up in the strangest ways, depending on how far a world may have
'backslid' during the Long Night, for example.

Sometimes, in tech, the "best" doesn't win; it may be the one that makes it
to market first with enough of a lead time over everything else, or it
might be something that's "good enough" but less expensive to produce, or
it may be the one that has better licensing terms, or it may be the one
that can be done "now", even though doing it this other way may be better
when we can do it "later".

Or, the 'better' tech, however you choose to define it, might be enough
better that it will win out even if it is at an initial disadvantage.

Beta was technically better than VHS, but VHS won in the market because
Sony held out on their refusal to license it for porn.

Token Ring started out as technically better than Ethernet, but Ethernet
got nominally faster, sooner, and was "good enough" and cheaper to produce
(Ethernet was able to run with RJ45 connectors before Token Ring, which
used - and continued to support - the original clunky connectors long past
the time it was really justifiable. That also made it cheaper to produce).

In Eric Flint's _1632_ universe, one can purchase an "aqualator", a
calculator (four-function) that uses fluidics rather than electronics -
because the local tech base could do fluidics _now_, but they didn't have
the tools to make the tools to make the tools that might allow them to
produce useful electronics in the near future (from whenever they got to
the last set of tools).

Steam and electric cars weren't unknown - or necessarily even rare - in the
late 1890s through early 1920s - the Stanley Steamer was a well-known
external-combustion (steam) model, and there were several models of
electric vehicles (with admittedly limited range). The internal combustion
motor proved more efficient, and even with its later start, was able to
take over. However, consider the situation of "Columbia" in the world of
L.E.Modesitt's _Of Tangible Ghosts_: Columbia, comprising much of North
America, but excluding Texas and the Southwest (essentially the part of the
US that was taken from Mexico) has very little domestic oil, so as a matter
of national security, most civilian vehicles are steamers. For reasons
unknown, the "North American Union" of _The Two Georges_ by Harry
Turtledove and Richard Dreyfuss also seems to prefer steam cars over
internal combustion.

Suppose that, for whatever reason, the Vilani didn't use fossil fuels. When
they tried to "Vilanicise" everyone that they encountered, what would that
have done to the tech base of what eventually accreted to the Ziru Sirka?
Would this have changed after the Terran conquest, or after the Sylean
conquest? Or, more accurately, _how much_ would they have changed? If the
Vilani used steam-powered ground cars, would the Sylean Expansion have
found everyone changed over to oil-fraction-powered internal-combustion
engine ground cars, or would steam cars still have been at least a sizeable
fraction of what was available?

Most of today's tech base in computers would have been considered science
fiction - or outright technofantasy - only sixty years ago. There's a whole
genre of "modern" speculative fiction - "retro-futurism" - that starts from
a lower tech base than we have today, and extrapolates from the
then-current ideas to a future. Traveller itself has some elements of that
'baked in' - but what if it extrapolated from an even earlier tech base?

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